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Siebs's Law
Siebs's law is a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) phonological rule named after the German linguist Theodor Siebs. According to this law, if an s-mobile is added to a root that starts with a voiced or aspirated stop, that stop is allophonically devoiced. Compare: :PIE > Latin '' fragor'', :but > PIE > Sanskrit ''sphūrjati''. Discussion Siebs proposed this law in the ''Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete der indogermanischen Sprachen'', as ''Anlautstudien'' (Berlin, 1904, 37: 277–324). Oswald Szemerényi has rejected this rule, explaining that it is untenable and cites the contradiction present in Avestan ''zdī'' from PIE "be!" as counterproof (Szemerényi 1999: 144). However, the PIE form is more accurately reconstructed as from (so not an s-mobile) and thus Siebs' law appears to demand that the sibilant and aspirated stop are both adjacent and tautosyllabic Two or more segments are tautosyllabic (with each other) if they occur in the same sylla ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Indo-European Language
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists. Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other proto-language, and it is the best understood of all proto-languages of its age. The majority of linguistic work during the 19th century was devoted to the reconstruction of PIE or its daughter languages, and many of the modern techniques of linguistic reconstruction (such as the comparative method) were developed as a result. PIE is hypothesized to have been spoken as a single language from 4500 BC to 2500 BC during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, though estimates vary by more than a thousand years. According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis, the original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans may have been in the Pontic–Caspian steppe of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Indo-European Phonology
The phonology of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) has been reconstructed by linguists, based on the similarities and differences among current and extinct Indo-European languages. Because PIE was not written, linguists must rely on the evidence of its earliest attested descendants, such as Hittite, Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Latin, to reconstruct its phonology. The reconstruction of abstract units of PIE phonological systems (i.e. segments, or phonemes in traditional phonology) is mostly uncontroversial, although areas of dispute remain. Their phonetic interpretation is harder to establish; this pertains especially to the vowels, the so-called laryngeals, the palatal and plain velars and the voiced and voiced aspirated stops. Phonemic inventory Proto-Indo-European is reconstructed to have used the following phonemes. See the article on Indo-European sound laws for a summary of how these phonemes reflected in the various Indo-European languages. Consonants The table ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Theodor Siebs
Theodor Siebs (; 26 August 1862 – 28 May 1941) was a German linguist most remembered today as the author of '' Deutsche Bühnenaussprache'' ("German stage pronunciation"), published in 1898. The work was largely responsible for setting the standard pronunciation of the modern German language and is referred to popularly by German speakers as ''der Siebs'' ("the Siebs"). Siebs was born in Bremen, Germany on 26 August 1862. Siebs studied linguistics and classical philology in Tübingen and later was a professor both at the University of Greifswald and the University of Breslau. His writings on language and languages are varied, but there is an emphasis on the history and state of Frisian languages. His ''Deutsche Bühnenaussprache'' is still relevant, though, for practical purposes it has largely been supplanted by other works that employ the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), which Siebs' work did not. Siebs died on 28 May 1941 in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland). ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
S-mobile
In Indo-European studies, the term s-''mobile'' ( ; the word is a Latin declension, Latin neuter adjective) designates the phenomenon where a Proto-Indo-European root, PIE root appears to begin with an ' which is sometimes but not always present. It is therefore represented in the Reflex (linguistics), reflex of the root in some attested derivatives but not others. The fact that there is no consistency about which language groups retain the s-mobile in individual cases is good evidence that it is an original Indo-European phenomenon, and not an element added or lost in the later history of particular languages. General description This "movable" prefix ''*s-'' appears at the beginning of some Indo-European roots, but is absent from other occurrences of the same root. For example, the stem ', perhaps 'aurochs', gives Latin ' and Old English ' (Modern English language, English '), both meaning 'bull'. Both variants existed side by side in PIE, with Germanic preserving the forms as ''*s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Allophone
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in ''stop'' ) and the aspirated form (as in ''top'' ) are allophones for the phoneme , while these two are considered to be different phonemes in some languages such as Thai. On the other hand, in Spanish, (as in ''dolor'' ) and (as in ''nada'' ) are allophones for the phoneme , while these two are considered to be different phonemes in English. The specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable from the phonetic context, with such allophones being called positional variants, but some allophones occur in free variation. Replacing a sound by another allophone of the same phoneme usually does not change the meaning of a word, but the result may sound non-native or even unintelligible. Native speakers of a given languag ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the Roman Republic it became the dominant language in the Italian region and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. Even after the fall of Western Rome, Latin remained the common language of international communication, science, scholarship and academia in Europe until well into the 18th century, when other regional vernaculars (including its own descendants, the Romance languages) supplanted it in common academic and political usage, and it eventually became a dead language in the modern linguistic definition. Latin is a highly inflected language, with three distinct genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), six or seven noun cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, and vocative), five declensions, four verb conjuga ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late Bronze Age. Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism, the language of classical Hindu philosophy, and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism. It was a link language in ancient and medieval South Asia, and upon transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia, East Asia and Central Asia in the early medieval era, it became a language of religion and high culture, and of the political elites in some of these regions. As a result, Sanskrit had a lasting impact on the languages of South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, especially in their formal and learned vocabularies. Sanskrit generally connotes several Old Indo-Aryan language varieties. The most archaic of these is the Vedic Sanskrit found in the Rig Veda, a colle ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oswald Szemerényi
__NOTOC__ Oswald John Louis Szemerényi, FBA (; 7 September 1913 in London – 29 December 1996 in Freiburg) was a Hungarian Indo-Europeanist with strong interests in comparative linguistics in general. Biography He was educated in Hungary, at Eötvös Loránd University, and he studied at the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin. He was influenced by Hungarian linguist Gyula Laziczius. In 1942 he was appointed lecturer in Greek at Budapest University. In 1944 he habilitated with a thesis on Balto-Slavic unity, and in 1947 he was appointed professor of comparative Indo-European linguistics in Budapest. He returned to England in 1948, where he worked for Bedford College until 1960. He was professor of linguistics at Freiburg University from 1965 to 1981. He founded the Freiburg Linguistics Circle, influenced by the Budenz Circle, led by Josef Budenz, the founder of Finno-Ugric studies. Selected bibliography *1960 ''Studies in the Indo-European System of Numerals'', Heidelb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Avestan
Avestan (), or historically Zend, is an umbrella term for two Old Iranian languages: Old Avestan (spoken in the 2nd millennium BCE) and Younger Avestan (spoken in the 1st millennium BCE). They are known only from their conjoined use as the scriptural language of Zoroastrianism, and the Avesta likewise serves as their namesake. Both are early Eastern Iranian languages within the Indo-Iranian language branch of the Indo-European language family. Its immediate ancestor was the Proto-Iranian language, a sister language to the Proto-Indo-Aryan language, with both having developed from the earlier Proto-Indo-Iranian language; as such, Old Avestan is quite close in both grammar and lexicon to Vedic Sanskrit, the oldest preserved Indo-Aryan language. The Avestan text corpus was composed in the ancient Iranian satrapies of Arachosia, Aria, Bactria, and Margiana, corresponding to the entirety of present-day Afghanistan as well as parts of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tautosyllabic
Two or more segments are tautosyllabic (with each other) if they occur in the same syllable. For instance, the English word "cat", , is monosyllabic and so its three phonemes , and are tautosyllabic. They can also be described as sharing a 'tautosyllabic distribution'. Phonemes that are not tautosyllabic are heterosyllabic. For example, in the English word "mustard" , and are heterosyllabic since they are members of different syllables. See also *Ambisyllabicity A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological " ..., sounds that are arguably shared between two syllables (such as 'rr' in British English "hurry") References * Phonotactics {{phonology-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sound Laws
A sound change, in historical linguistics, is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic change) or a more general change to the speech sounds that exist (phonological change), such as the merger of two sounds or the creation of a new sound. A sound change can eliminate the affected sound, or a new sound can be added. Sound changes can be environmentally conditioned if the change occurs in only some sound environments, and not others. The term "sound change" refers to diachronic changes, which occur in a language's sound system. On the other hand, " alternation" refers to changes that happen synchronically (within the language of an individual speaker, depending on the neighbouring sounds) and do not change the language's underlying system (for example, the ''-s'' in the English plural can be pronounced differently depending on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
